


This Little Chapel

by orphan_account



Category: Discworld - Pratchett
Genre: 1000-5000 Words, Angst, Canon Lesbian Character, Canon Lesbian Relationship, F/F, Pre-Canon, over 1000 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-15
Updated: 2005-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-04 07:08:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Grey House.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Little Chapel

There were lessons. They weren't meant to actually learn anything, except how to wash and dry and cook and carry, and that was something they learned every waking minute that wasn't a lesson or a meager meal.

Borogravian History and Nugganatic Law, they were called. They consisted of Sister Marcus telling the girls the same stories, over and over again, and memorising dates and rules. There was a Book of Nuggan in the classroom, and every morning Father Jupe would show up to read them the Abominations. This sometimes took all morning, especially when some of the girls and women had been found indulging in an abomination. The reading would be stopped at the appropriate point until the girl had been punished.

Sometimes it would be nothing more than a beating with the old, thick, heavy ruler. Sometimes, the girl would be stripped to her undergarments, made to kneel down and to insult herself until they were satisfied.

There was no writing, of course. They were women, after all.

There were plaques up all around the Grey House, hanging over them as they worked. Magda once found Tilda Tewt tracing the curvy letter with the line across on the wall below, her lips moving. Abomination. Sister Marcus was walking just behind Magda, so she cleared her throat loudly. Tilda was startled and drew her hand down just in time.

That was before they really knew each other.

The barrel had hit the ground, crashed and rolled, spilling its contents in on the ground, turning the sand into mud.

Magda had been shouting, and then she'd felt a sharp pain in her right hand and realised she's struck the soldier. He'd stumbled and fallen over, more out of shock than anything else. He'd been back in a crouch almost as quickly, and Magda could see his eyes narrowing, filthy uniform dribbled with fresh blood from a cut lip. He'd been taller than she was, heavier than she was, nastier than she was. But he hadn't reached for his sword.

Magda's fingers had closed over the butcher knife. Nothing but a pig, she'd thought, and fallen into automatic. Grab, turn, slice. Be quick, now.

It had really been quite easy.

She plunged the dolly into the steaming water and turned it. Four months, and she was stronger than she'd ever been, never mind how many times she'd wrestled pigs in the other world, the real world. She looked down across the line of women, girls and children on both sides, working as she did, repetitive, back-breaking women's work. When you got stronger, they gave you harder jobs. If we weren't all so tired to the bone... She didn't end that sentence. It had been so easy. She didn't want to do it again. Or, rather, she did, so she wouldn't even think of it. There was nothing to hold on to. Nothing but this dolly, and this repeating rotation, and the surety that there'd be someone to hit later on.

(They wore dimity scarves all day long, and certainly not because it kept the hair out of their eyes. Also not because the priests got lonely and were never kind. Except Father Jupe. She heard he was very kind, once he'd stopped beating you half to death. All the women's faces were red, sweaty, hardened by the steam and the heat, and their hands rough as bark. Their allure was their helplessness.)

"Here for murder." If there was a good reason to be in the Grey House, that was it. Nobody messed with you when you were there for murder. Of course they hadn't called it that, when they'd brought her in, or she'd have been hanged. The soldier had been a deserter, so they hadn't been quite able to tell if she hadn't done the motherland a service. But her father had known, her father had been furious, and it wasn't just the killing (such a heavy thump the body had made, just like a big hog) and how she and so he as well were the talk of the village and now he'd never win that best merchant's award on the market and the Mayor had stopped saying good morning to him. It was what Magda had said when he first hit her for what she'd done that sealed the matter, that sealed her fate.

He'd never been around much. He didn't do anything around the house. If it hadn't been for the regular swell of her mother's belly Magda would hardly have known he ever visited the house. She'd done it all, she and some of her sisters and brothers, and Mother. Everything. He'd grown fat and rich on the work of his army of slaves, who tended the pigs and butchered and sliced and sold while he sat on his fat arse and hobnobbed with the Merchants' Association.

That's what Magda had said, when he'd accused her of conspiring against him, when she'd cut into the deserter she had found fumbling with his breeches, bending over the crumbled, sobbing body of her ten-year-old sister turned belly-down on top of a barrel. She'd do it again, she'd said, and something had clicked. She would do it to him, she'd said.

At the time, she'd thought that was the worst beating anyone could have. Maybe it was. None of the other times had her older brothers been holding her down.

She'd heard, after Tilda Tewt was gone, that she'd been sent to that mill, the one that nobody came back from. Poor bastard, Magda had thought. Better her than me.

Tilda had smiled and laughed, Magda was almost sure of it, those few weeks they'd been together at the Grey House before Tilda was shipped off to work in the other world. There was laughter, even in the House. It was a dangerous laugh, a violent laugh, a hard-working woman's laugh, most often. She couldn't remember the tone of Tilda's laugh. When she came back, there was no trace of a smile. And she was quiet.

Magda heard her throwing up one early morning, in the darkness of the hall were the women slept, and knew that was a beating offence. Sobs followed the retching, and mumbles, almost like a prayer. Off her head, Magda thought.

The following morning she heard the rumour. She slipped out during the lunch hour, another beating offence but she could get away with it, if she was careful, and she went up to the top floor, where the view opened up for miles around. She searched for a long while until she saw the mill. The smoke had already cleared out, except for tiny wisps that wound their way through the tops of the trees. That was the old mill. She was almost sure of it. It was true.

Well done, lass, she thought, filled with hungry glee.

She'd heard lovers before, in the hall, trying to be quiet, moving and sighing softly against each other's skin, in a rustle of blankets. She'd lain awake to listen to them. Once she almost, almost reached out to touch a pair right next to her, wanting nothing so much as to share, but no, of course she couldn't, it was their special secret thing, their world of skin and affection that she couldn't share, could only break.

And now it was hers, hers and Tilda's, and oh, Tilda.

The Duchess's picture watched them from the darkness. Nuggan's eyes are everywhere, said Father Jupe, and he hears your every thought. Magda thought a very rude thought, and then nothing more, nothing that wasn't Tilda.

'Did I ever hit you?' she whispered. Tilda's hair billowed out over the mattress in the dim growing morning light. They only had a few minutes left.

She'd hit so many people. So many girls. When she thought back to the deserter, she felt less and less guilt, but what had happened before in the House now knotted her belly tight, made her throat constrict. She felt she would be sick soon, as sick as Tilda now was every morning. Her hand clenched into a fist over the swell of Tilda's belly.

'No,' Tilda whispered back. 'You never noticed me,' she added after a while.

'I'm so sorry I ever did that,' Magda managed, blinking back tears she wasn't expecting, and hadn't shed for as long as she could remember.

Tilda touched her lips with her own, saying nothing more.

She hit just one more girl. Sonya. Sonya had been the one who held the newcomers as Magda's fist buried into them. She was the one who liked to kick. She was the one who never shut up. She pulled on Magda's hair, hard, and called her a weasel and told her she'd get hers if she thought she was better than her old mates. Once. Twice. After the third blow Sonya stayed down, on her knees on the floor, dripping blood.

Then, no more.

'Not on a highway. It wouldn't be safe for the baby, or you. But afterwards. There'll have to be some ceremony. I hear the mothers' ward isn't as well guarded. We'll make it somehow. Take the stash and buy a way on the mail coach. Just get far enough away. Anything's better than this.'

The next time Magda felt like crying, she didn't. She let the urge sink into her fury. Tilda, who never cried in front of anybody, was sobbing in her arms. She held her in a vice-like grip, hard and unyielding and absolute. Tilda's belly was flat now; she was wearing a rag all the time now to stop the bleeding, which came and went with no discernible rhythm. Tilda cried like a wounded animal: shivering, still, horrible.

The sounds echoed off the high wall of the chapel. Their mops lay discarded on the floor, soaped water sinking into the floor.

They dressed in the dark, listening to the sound of shouting and running footsteps above. Everyone was in a hurry to get out; nobody would be in a hurry to get here, in this old cleaned out cellar, full of soap boxes and cobwebs. They each had their own pile of clothes, picked out earlier, and they fumbled to find out which end of which piece was which, to pull on the unfamiliar shirts. They'd bound their chests earlier, in the privy, with a sheet torn to strips.

Magda hauled the boxes up against the small window high up, climbed up, put her foot against the wall, gripped the bars and pulled. The carefully weakened stone crumbled under her strength, and fell on the floor in a pile of rubble and metal.

She took Tilda by the waist, intending to lift her up. Tilda's sharp fingers buried into her side, and Magda found herself embraced and embracing, instead. For one last moment, they held each in the darkness under this heavy dark roof.

'We'll make it,' Magda said.

The black shadow that was Tilda nodded. 'And we'll come back,' she said.

'In the summer.'

They kissed for a moment, frightened to death and madly free. Then they climbed out into the cool autumn breeze and ran.

The flames were already dying in the east wing, but summer would come, and before that, the world.


End file.
